


when it's all gone i miss it

by tragickenobi



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Other, Post-Canon, Trans Eddie Brock, discussion of various scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-05 23:37:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16377206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tragickenobi/pseuds/tragickenobi
Summary: there are good scars and there are bad scars.





	when it's all gone i miss it

**Author's Note:**

> this one's for u, lee, bastard
> 
> title from void by the nghbrhd 
> 
> behold a plotless nonsense, weirdly exploring my favorite relationship i've seen onscreen in a while

 

 

Eddie has accumulated a lot of scars over a very clumsy and vaugely dangerous life.

It’s not something that has ever crossed his mind very frequently, especially in the time Before Venom. But since he’s acquired the little guy ( _or big guy, depending_ , his mind follows up with a moment later), it’s been very easy to fixate on this new relationship with his body, what heals and what doesn’t.

Venom, for their part, is never afraid to ask a question; almost to a fault and always without any semblance of filter. Eddie feels like he’s in charge of a toddler- they never stop asking questions, always probe past sensibility, and most days he has to talk them down from casual homicide as the solution to all their problems.

**_You do not._ **

Eddie’s laugh comes out as little more than a push of air through his nose. Venom is usually quiet during showers, perceptive enough to realize that the string of loosely-connected thoughts that zip through Eddie’s head during this time are usually meaningless and forgotten about by the time he’s halfway to dried off. The rare quip of input is appreciated if for nothing else than to remind him to finish up. He knows Venom hates the heat of the water most days, stays tucked away somewhere they don’t have to feel the brunt of it; one of their less serious sticking points in squabbles.

His mind starts to backtrack where it had been before once he shuts the water off, the first hit of the apartment’s pitiful AC creating goosebumps along his skin. He starts thinking about scars again. Throughout his life, Eddie’s had his share of fist-fights, scrapes with dozens of those he’d antagonized as a result of his work. He’s even been shot at once or twice (in the time Before Venom, of course; any time he’s been shot at _since_ Venom is just like water off his back). His hands are littered with shallow little divots, almost unnoticeable reminders of some specific fuckups back long ago.

Eddie runs his towel over his face before leaving it to hang haphazardly around his shoulders. It’s his own face in the mirror today- ever since the first time he’d seen Venom staring back in his reflection, they’d made it a long-running joke to surprise Eddie for their own weird sense of amusement. Just thinking about it generates a feeling of faint bass in the back of his mind, the closest Venom ever gets to juvenile snickering. _Toddler_.

There’s no verbal response back, so Eddie’s thoughts continue to go along their loosely connected track. The scars on his chest are the most obvious, the first to come to mind when he thinks of the marks on his body, but the ones he tries to think about the least.

 ** _It makes you anxious_**.

Eddie makes eye contact with himself in the mirror. “Lotta shit makes me anxious, y’gotta be more specific.”

He gives himself one more run down before trading the towel for the underwear and sweats he’d left for himself to grab on the door. It’s not avoiding the question, he tells himself, hopping from foot to foot and hoping for forgiveness from the apartment downstairs as he does.

**_You know what we mean._ **

Blackness rises up beneath the skin of Eddie’s chest, hovering there for a moment before retreating back again. The feeling isn’t unpleasant, but the focus on it doesn’t exactly feel good, either.

“Yeah, well,” Eddie shrugs, not quite balanced on his attempt at casual, “getting hurt makes people feel bad. That’s kind of the whole point.”

They fight with Drake was traumatic for them both. Of course it was. While Venom had quickly come in to save him from dying, something about the time without him (and perhaps the time immediately after, once he’d been flung to safety in the sea) had meant that wound didn’t heal all the way. Healed _enough_ , certainly, but a vertical stripe of significantly lighter skin down his sternum is a brand, a reminder; Eddie is accustomed to Venom now, but without him, he is fragile, frustratingly human.

He doesn’t know if the frustration with his morality is his own or Venom’s, or if it matters.

 ** _If these things bother you,_ ** Venom’s fixation doesn’t waver, and Eddie can feel the movement underneath his skin. He doesn’t know how movement can feel contemplative. **_We can try healing them._**

The use of plural terminology gives a bit of a jump to Eddie, quickly looking down at his chest and swatting at the murky blackness that had started to rise up to the surface beneath _all_ the scars there. “Shit, y’don’t- not _all_ of them need to get scrubbed out. Stop it.”

**_But they distress us?_ **

Eddie flounders for a moment, mouth open with a half-cocked explanation that he quickly realizes the alien isn’t going to understand or even give a shit about. “You’re not gonna get it. Just don’t- don’t fuck with anything there, alright?”

He gives himself another wipe-down, because he really does not trust Venom to do what they’re told the first time around, before beelining to the bedroom. He makes it a whole two steps through the door frame before his hands fly out of their own accord and catch himself on the frame. Eddie looks over at them, feels the formation starting on the side of his shoulder, and lazily lolls his head to meet it.

“I thought we talked about this.”

**_You’re being a dick to us._ **

Eddie raises an eyebrow, even as the distant fuzz of Venom’s control over his arms slowly fades away again. The little head now sprouted to look at him still doesn’t have all that much in way of expressiveness, but he gets the sense that they’re returning the stare.

“We aren’t having this conversation,” he says flatly, continuing the walk to bed at a much slower pace.

Venom’s head tilts in dissatisfaction.

“And whether I’m being a dick or not- you don’t just get to take over ‘nd plant me wherever you want.” Eddie adds, shaking his head as an afterthought. He’s still kind of cold in the aftermath of the shower and a little bit pissy, but he’s not quite reached the level of spiteful that trying to smother Venom’s mostly fully-formed head with a shirt would entail.

For as long as he spends walking around the room until his brain winds down to a lower frequency, Venom is uncharacteristically quiet. He can still feel the slight unease there, hovering, as if giving Eddie the silent treatment is going to be enough to guilt him into a conversation about the difference between good and bad through the lens of his stupid fucking chest scars. It shouldn’t be that big of a deal- but it kind of is.

Eddie sits on the side of the bed, cracks his neck, and realizes Venom has retracted back into him.

**_We are supposed to protect you._ **

Eddie lets his shoulders slump. A successful guilt trip; point to them.

“That’s not the problem. I promise, not even close,” he reaches around for a blanket that isn’t there, only for one of Venom’s tendrils to pull it from the ground on the other side of the bed. It comes up over his shoulders and Eddie takes it from there, laying back into the pillows with a small sigh of content. “It’s more complicated than that, little guy.”

This time, Venom rises up from his stomach, formed pretty much in their entirety from the chest up. Eddie looks up at him leisurely, kind of wondering when it stopped being weird to just lounge around like this with the same casualness most people do their laundry with.

**_You don’t like them._ **

Eddie shrugs. “Not entirely.”

 ** _Then we should get rid of them_ **.

“No, we shouldn’t.”

Venom does their best imitation of a scoff and tilts their head. **_Then explain. You’re annoying when you don’t make sense._ **

Eddie shrugs again, rubbing at one eye that seems more than eager to close, try to sleep. “It’s kinda like the people thing. Some good, some bad, some a weird fuckin’ mix of all of it.” He thinks about it again for a moment, racking his brain for a metaphor that makes some sense outside of his own thoughts. The only thing he _knows_ is that he’s not even going to try and touch the explaining-gender conversation they keep tiptoeing towards. “It’s like my leg. If you ate my leg-”

**_We would not eat your leg._ **

“No I know, but I’m saying, like, if you did, that would change who I was. I wouldn’t be the same Eddie anymore without my leg.”

**_You would still be Eddie. You would just have to hop._ **

Something about the blunt imagery of that makes Eddie burst out laughing, one hand still pressed into his face. Trying to explain the significance of a permanent mark to a being that can heal whenever they want feels like using a treadmill; he’s tired, he’s working at it, but he’s still in the same place he started.

“I don’t know,” he mumbles, second hand playing along the skin where he and Venom connect, “I don’t always like them, but they all mean something. They’re reminders of who I am and what we do and why we are the way we are, so in that sense I sometimes _do_ like ‘m.”

Venom’s head cocks to the side, and it’s a little heartwarming that Eddie can tell they’re genuinely trying to grasp this. There’s still a faint smile on his face as he holds out a hand and the symbiote shrinks down, either dissipating back into Eddie’s chest or crawling around and up his arm. It’s bizarre to actually _feel_ that interconnectivity, but not in a way that causes anything other than total bliss. He can sense a similar fondness through their mental- link, is the best way to put it. He can’t call it a full connection- Venom can’t like, read his mind or anything; not unless Eddie in some way projects to them- but there’s enough of _something_ to qualify.

 ** _We will not heal them,_** Venom’s voice is a low bass in the back and front of his mind, somehow both like they’re right there beside him and a thought within his head at the same time. **_But we will not put us in a position where we could get more._**

Eddie nods, an action mostly meant to himself. “That’s not something I’m going to say no to, buddy.”

His body relaxes into it’s preferred sleeping position, head half shoved under a pillow and a mes of limbs the way most people wake up. Even with the general lack of space, after a moment, he can feel the symbiote begin to form again at his shoulder. It’s not a head so much as it is just a solidity, something that he can press into naturally. Pencil-thin tendrils continue to branch out across his body, mostly taking to whatever skin had been left exposed.

By the time Eddie is mostly into unconsciousness, the hold has begun to feel like arms, warm and real.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> well, we all hyperfixate sometimes. kudos to me for not turning my first non-star wars fic on this site into the usual blind pornography, even though i'm less proud of this than i usually am of my works i decide to publish.
> 
> anyway if you like this please consider commissioning me! information about that can be found on my twitter @chirrutbaze and it's a whole lot faster than waiting for me to get bit with the Intense Hyperfixation bug and publish here again.


End file.
